Entire Sanctification 7

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24. So my mother drove me back to Central for May term while I sported a patch over my scratched eyeball. [1]

I always made the trip to Central from Fort Lauderdale in two stages. First was the drive to Lakeland where my brother-in-law was pastoring. Then the rest of the way. In those torturous days of 55 miles an hour, it took four hours to my sister's and another ten to Central. Only AM radio. Country Georgia stations. Torture.

In that decade of my hyper-conscience without cruise control, I spent almost half the time while I drove watching the analog speedometer. It was not fear of a ticket. It was fear of hell. One should obey the laws of the land and the speed limit is a law of the land. You could make an exception if someone was about to give birth. But under normal circumstances, a Christian should follow the speed limit as part of obeying God.

I used to say that I killed my conscience in seminary. Not really, of course. I mean I began to gain victory over whatever "demon" tortured me all those years to excess. One should of course generally obey the laws of the land. One should give to Caesar what is Caesar's. This is a good witness.

But there is also a huge difference between the law of the land and God's law. Human law is nowhere near as important as God's law, and sometimes human law is stupid. It can be evil. For example, Jim Crow laws were evil. There is a time to practice civil disobedience to work toward good. The Wesleyan Methodist Church was founded on civil disobedience in relation to slavery.

People like me pass laws. A big aha moment in relation to the Wesleyan Discipline was when I realized that people like me voted on the things they put in the Discipline. My dad treated the Discipline almost like it was the Bible. It was certainly law. I did grow up with a great reverence for the "fathers" who created the Discipline.

But people like me created the Discipline. It's very sober. It definitely suggests that the Discipline is a work in progress. The older the material in the Discipline, the weightier its material is (e.g., the Articles of Religion). But if people like me create the Discipline, it is far from inerrant.

25. On my drive to Lakeland after Christmas 1984, I was worried about entire sanctification. I had not yet ticked off that box for certain with trips to the altar. The nineteenth century holiness movement, under the influence of Phoebe Palmer, did not have Wesley's sense that it could take a lifetime to reach perfect love or Christian perfection. At one point Wesley suspected that few would reach it in their lifetimes.

Palmer had promoted a different approach, and it was this approach that had underwritten the holiness revivals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I call Palmer's approach "name it claim it entire sanctification." She called it a "shorter way." Her basic question was, "Why should we wait to be entirely sanctified? What if God wants to perfect us now?"

Of course I never heard the name Phoebe Palmer growing up. As far as I knew, we were just reading the Bible and doing what it says. Chris Bounds presented options of sanctification at the 2008 General Conference: shorter, middle, longer. I heard that one General Superintendent remarked he had never heard of Phoebe Palmer, but perhaps he said he had never heard of this delineation.

It is another reminder that a lot of what we call the Bible is really tradition about the Bible. I'm not denying, by the way, that a person can be sanctified early in their Christian walk. In fact, in my college honor's project, I argued that it would ideally happen at the same time as conversion. More on sanctification later. I'm simply pointing out that what we mean by the Bible often isn't really the Bible, but some tribal tradition we confuse with the Bible.

In these days I genuinely once thought to myself, "How amazing it is that I just happened to be born into the church that has everything right. What are the odds?!" The more I could place myself in the flow of history, I began to speak of "the Wesleyan tradition" as one of many historical currents. Once using this language in conversation sparked this response: "Stop saying Wesleyan tradition. We just read the Bible and do what it says." :-)

26. On the drive to Lakeland I had a voice in my head. It could have been the Spirit. It might have been my neurotic self. "If you really were surrendered to God," it said. "if you really put God first, you would not go back to Central until you were entirely sanctified."

I really liked college. I didn't want to stay at home or at my sister's. I wanted to go back to college. I had in mind the sermons I had heard on Jacob wrestling with an angel in Genesis 32. "I will not let you go until you bless me." So if I really was fully surrendered to God, I would refuse to go back to college until God blessed me with entire sanctification.

I wrestled with this idea while I drove. My mother was completely unaware of the inner struggle.

Finally I said OK. "OK, Lord, I will not leave Lakeland until I am entirely sanctified. I will go in the sanctuary when we arrive and not leave until the work is done."

In that moment I felt a great release. I felt a great peace come over me, like the peace I experienced once about salvation on the stairs going to the second floor of our Fort Lauderdale house. When we arrived at Lakeland, I went into the sanctuary and thanked God. He was merciful on me, because there were plenty of other times when I prayed that I didn't find peace.

I want to emphasize this point. During that ten year period I prayed repeatedly for forgiveness looking for peace. I almost never had peace. I am immensely grateful for the peace of that moment.

By the way, I remember now that I had Theology of Holiness with Dongell as well. We used Jessop's Foundations of Doctrine. Another classic.

27. Flash forward to a year and a half later after poking my eye. I was in Marling Elliott's Greek Synoptic Gospels class. I always liked May term classes. You only had to focus on one course. It was easier to focus. The fall was always hardest with multiple courses and the descent into winter darkness and cold. The spring was always much better but still required balancing multiple courses. May was warm, beautiful, and focused.

I think it might have been in that class that I was first exposed to how Matthew 2:15 quotes Hosea 11:1. Elliott pointed out that Matthew sees the quote in relation to Jesus leaving Egypt. But that's not what Hosea 11 was about. Hosea 11:1 is about the exodus. So Hosea was not a prediction about Jesus. It reads, "When Israel was a child, I called my son out of Egypt, but the more I called them the more they served other gods." Was Matthew mistaken in saying this verse was fulfilled in the life of Jesus?

More on that question when I get to seminary. In college, I just smiled and thought to myself. "Interesting. I'll figure it out." There were some pages in the back of my Thompson Chain Reference Bible that showed prophesies fulfilled in the life of Jesus or the New Testament. It is an argument you hear sometimes. Christianity has to be true because of all the Scriptures fulfilled in Jesus. More to come.

28. My mother had given me The Battle for the Bible by Harold Lindsell. In the back he suggests some possible reconciliations of alleged discrepancies in the Bible. [2] One of them had to do with the denials of Peter in the Gospels. Lindsell, as a suggestion, proposed that there might have been six denials, three before the cock crowed once and three more before it crowed twice.

I didn't like that option. It sounded ridiculous. It didn't pass the sniff test for special pleading. The way I would later put it is that Lindsell created a fifth Gospel that was more unlike the actual Gospels than they are different from each other. He created his own Gospel version because a certain idea of inerrancy was important to him--in a sense more important to him than actually listening to the biblical texts themselves.

I was a little overconfident. I decided to write my final paper for the class on reconciling the Gospel accounts of Peter's denial. I started with Matthew and Mark. Piece of cake. Easily reconciled. Then I added Luke. Easy. It can be done.

About 4am in writing the paper I got to John. Couldn't figure it out. John is the one that is so different that Lindsell proposed six denials. I came up with what I could and turned in the paper in the morning with a sense of unfulfillment. Either I wasn't smart enough or, just maybe, they can't really be reconciled on the level of detail.

Eventually I concluded that my expectations on such things were wrong, I would sometimes say wryly that I just wasn't smart enough to figure out such things. There are some incredibly smart people who come up with the most ingenious proposals for some of these conundrums. I'm just not that smart.

What I'm really saying is that such "ingenious" proposals are usually too far fetched to be believable. There is a person who is incredibly smart at finagling details but lacks a big picture perspective to see that they have entered a twilight zone. The world of truth is not so much a matter of what is possible as about what is probable. The ingenious proposals of Lindsell and others might be possible but they are not the most obvious reading of the evidence. That is to say, they are not as likely to be true.

29. This relates to another comment I have sometimes made. The mentality that such approaches creates is one that fosters a conspiratorial view of the world. The truth is not sought where it is most likely to be found, but we see it where we want it to be found. We become suspicious of real experts and can create a culture of anti-knowledge that, if empowered enough, becomes a threat to society...

[1] I didn't have a car my first year of college. After that it was a Chevy Citation that had been one of my dad's company cars. Every year he got a company car because he did a lot of driving to assess car damage. Sometimes he would then buy them at a discount.

[2] At some point I also acquired about a 700 page book called Alleged Discrepancies.